How to Choose an Original Painting for Your Home
For twenty years I ran an art school in Newmarket, and the question I heard more than any other wasn't about technique — it was some version of "how do I know if this is right for my house?" I gave roughly the same answer to hundreds of students and collectors then, and I still give it now, so I may as well write it down properly.
Start with the feeling, not the wall
Buy what stops you, not what matches the cushions. A room built around a colour scheme is forgettable; a room built around a painting you can't stop looking at rarely is. If you've been scrolling the store or the paintings and one keeps pulling you back, that's the one doing its job — the wall will follow.
Size is the mistake almost everyone makes
Nearly everyone undersizes. A painting hung over a sofa or a mantel should generally hold at least two-thirds the width of the furniture below it, and a lone small canvas on a big wall usually reads as an afterthought rather than a statement. When you're torn between two sizes, take the larger one — go bigger before you go smaller; a wall rarely feels overwhelmed, but it almost always feels underdressed.
Texture you only get up close
My paintings are latex-acrylic, built up in layers with straight and angled brushes. From across a room the shapes read clean and graphic — that's deliberate. Walk closer and you'll find ridges of paint holding the line of a brushstroke, especially through water or a treeline, where I load the brush and let the mark stay. That's something a photo on a phone can't fully carry, and it's worth seeing a piece up close before you decide, even if that just means asking for a better close-up shot.
Original, or a signed and numbered print
An original is the one version of that painting that will ever exist, and once it's sold, it's gone. If the piece you love has already found a home, or the original sits outside your budget, most of my mountain and coastal work is also available as a signed and numbered canvas giclée — a real limited edition of 95, not an open-ended reprint.
If nothing's quite right, tell me
Sometimes the right painting for a particular wall doesn't exist yet. That's what a commission is for — it starts with nothing more than a photo and the story behind it, and it's how quite a few collectors have ended up with a piece closer to perfect than anything already on my walls.
Where to start looking
Start wherever pulls you: the Rockies, Bow Valley mornings, Lake Louise and Moraine Lake, the West Coast, a bloom that means something, or bold colour for a modern room. However you get there, reach out if you want a second opinion before you commit — I still enjoy that conversation as much as I did in the classroom. — Martin